Getting Past the Present : ALL IT TAKES <i> by Patricia Volk (Atheneum: $17.45; 224 pp.; 0-689-12061-3) </i>

There are problems with using the present tense to tell a story. To begin with, it’s a facile device --easily duplicated, easily imitated. Much writing can begin to sound alike. But additionally, as Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a recent essay, “Some thoughts on Narrative,” the present tense “not only competes against the story with a vastly superior weight of reality but limits it to the pace of a watch hand or heartbeat.”

“The present tense,” she continues, “which some writers of narrative fiction currently employ because it is supposed to make the telling ‘more actual,’ actually distances the story.” It generalizes, she adds, and also deals so much with nondirectional time that it can deny narrative a journey. Characters have the distinct possibility of seeming shallow or inert, mired in moment-to-moment minutiae, their activities seemingly inconsequential. They lack memory, the “other country” of the past that gives the narrative “the freedom to move toward its future, the present.”

This is precisely the unmoored feeling in certain, though not all, of Patricia Volk’s stories in her new collection, “All It Takes.” The language here is terse, almost staccato, the tense usually present. These 15 stories are for the most part set in New York. They are urbane, sophisticated rather than populist, more humorous than tragic, and the vogue figures in au courant talk.

I can imagine a reader laughing while reading these stories--laughing at the witty, ironic things people do and say, as one does with entertaining, high-style old films. The more serious stories, however, and those that employ a past tense that seems to give them depth missing in others, are ultimately the most successful.

According to the author, who is quoted in a press release, these stories deal “with the hard times people give each other in the name of love.” But such love repeatedly appears as something more like self-involvement or blind longing. The alienation sets in before the love is ever found or lost.

In the story “Rules and Laws,” for instance, Honey makes love with her old high school crush Goldring when they are both well into adulthood out of . . . what? Boredom? Passivity? Inertia? This is the explanation given:

“Sometimes you go through with something because you think you don’t want to but you really do. Other times you go through with something because you think you want to, but you really don’t. Then there are the times you go through with something simply because it is inevitable. And at those times what you go through happens with the kind of velocity that is described at length in the laws of physics. It is that same thrust that, when a car stops short, keeps you moving forward regardless, over the steering wheel, clear through the windshield, and out onto the hood.”

The stories seem to grow stronger the deeper into the book one reads. In the beginning, a story like “Mystery Salad” charms but seems too blithe, rather indifferent in tone: an airy account of a luncheon involving an aging, eccentric aunt and her niece and names that can’t be gotten right --amusing, but somehow insubstantial. The next few stories also ride the surface, and by the third or fourth, the present tense begins to flatten the work. This is the opening of “Blue Light”:

“On my way uptown to Billy’s, I stop by Macy’s. The 7:00 a.m. news said Macy’s is getting a delivery of six hundred Squaw Babies before noon. My daughter Zoe has never been attached to a doll. She likes to destroy books. It puzzles us.” The search for Squaw Baby continues into the story, which is about a number of almost unbelievable things (infidelity that engenders no guilt). One thing it is not about is the kind of culture that sells a doll with such a name.

“The Yellow Banana,” “Reckless Dreamer” and the little story “All It Takes” are of a whole different literary weight than something like “Her Mother’s Daughter.” These are the best stories in the collection, and they really stand out. Others still end up being funny in a self-mocking way. Volk’s earlier books include a novel (“White Light”) and a collection of short stories.

The work in this volume demonstrates Volk’s talent for irony and wit. It’s when she dispenses with the facile tone and the present tense, however, that we are most deeply moved.